Update on Our Literary Estates

Picture of Martin Reed

Martin Reed

Martin was the SoA's Head of Communications from 2016 to 2024.

The SoA owns or manages more than 50 literary estates – Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster among them – and uses the income from these to support all of its work.

Our Literary Estates team is always busy managing and selling those rights. Through their efforts the British Library has recently released two classic crime novels by Freeman Wills Crofts, pioneer of the ‘unbreakable alibi’.

Last month the BBC televised a new adaptation of The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley’s best-loved novel, which you can still catch on iPlayer. The BBC also produced a programme on Philip Larkin for their Poetry Season, presented by A. N. Wilson, which featured recordings of the poet reading his work.

Watch out for the National Theatre’s forthcoming production of Waste, Harley Granville Barker’s timeless masterpiece, opening 3 November. And there is still time to catch London Contemporary Theatre’s touring production of Pygmalion.

For Halloween and Christmas gifts, how about these gorgeous new editions of The Ride-by-Nights and Snow by Walter de la Mare.

27 August 2025

The Society of Authors in Scotland (SoAiS) is deeply disappointed to hear of the closure of the Scottish Book Trust’s Ignite Fellowship. The Fellowship’s loss also underlines the worrying trend of the clear decline of funding for arts and culture across Scotland.

7 August 2025

Our campaign for the rights and interests of authors in the face of big tech companies using copyrighted work to train their generative AI models continues this week.

5 August 2025

Lifetime SoA Fellow 1938-2025